A consumptive education needs a creative touch

Any institution is in the business of clay moulding! Lao Tzu said, “Clay is moulded into a vessel, the utility of that vessel lies in what is not, thus taking advantage of what is not, you create what is”

If an institution moulds people, it creates value and releases them into a society and nation where they contribute significantly. In line with Lao Tzu, it is important to know “what is not”. That can only be done in the backdrop of first knowing “what should be and thus what is not”.

Institutions have established curricula and pedagogies that lay the foundations for a good and strong individual.  However, education in India is at best a consumptive process for a learner with little opportunity to create beyond the pedagogy driven by curricula. It does not encourage questioning beyond the syllabus and hence the creative process remains largely restrained.

Let’s examine issues. India is a $1.8 trillion economy growing at 5 per cent or approx $90 billion annually. If that growth factors HR outlays, it may be surmised that 5 per cent of the $90 billion or $4.5 billion is the incremental outlay available on HR (that includes existing and prospective HR spend). Discounting the incremental spend on existing HR, it appears that the prospects for fresh HR induction  even if that were to get a 20 per cent share of the $4.5 billion, would be $900 million. With two million graduates fresh on the roads out shopping for jobs, if each one were to get a job, it would be worth $450 per annum, even if 25 per cent of the 2 million were to get a piece of the action of $900 mn, it would be the equivalent of $ 1800 per annum.

GDP is the composition of industry, agriculture and services. The median estimate in a survey of 16 economists by The Wall Street Journal shows India’s industrial output likely grew 0.70 per cent from a year earlier. Clearly the creation through industry is suffering, while agriculture is left to the benevolence of nature and the nature of services isn’t benevolent enough. For a nation’s economy, industry is the prime mover and calls for creative streaks! That said, it is time for us to go back to the drawing board to see how we may want to harness the young population of the country rather than remain self-congratulatory on account of all the fresh arrivals.

So what’s the merit of the argument?

We live in a VUCA world. (VUCA drawn from the military vocabulary is the new currency of existence). V is volatility. The nature and dynamics of change and the nature and speed of change force and change catalysts. U is Uncertainty. The lack of predictability, the prospects for surprise and the sense of awareness and understanding of issues and events. C is complexity. The multiplex of forces, the confounding of issues and the chaos and confusion that surround an organization. A is ambiguity. The haziness of reality, the potential for misreads and the mixed meanings of conditions; cause-and-effect confusion.

So, there is need for us to review the way we are tooling the younger population in the schools and the universities.

If there is a need for us to grow our industrial production, there is need for us to introduce a curriculum and a pedagogy that fosters creativity rather than consumptivity.

Education ought to become creative rather than remain consumptive for a learner. Creativity arises from an ability to question and find outcomes and not mere solutions. Here are the universal six masters that enable that and bring us to who, what, why, where, when and how we are. These are who, what, why, when, where and how.

If the earlier lament was a brain drain and even if we contained that, we may like to admit that a lot of it is still getting fished from remote locations, while the learners don’t realize how it consumes their mind share, leaving little of it with them to create.

The author is Director-Policy at Microsoft India. Views are personal